Ed. note: This is a guest post by Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr. It is part of the Strong Families Mama’s Day Our Waycelebration. You can read more posts in the series on the Strong Families blog. Strong Families is a national initiative led by Forward Together. Our goal is to change the way people think, act and talk about families. Rebecca’s bio is after the jump.

“No one threw me a baby shower. No one said congratulations. My pregnancy was not celebrated. My child’s birth was seen as a failure,” Jayme, a strong teenage mother, shared with me during a checkup for her healthy young baby. I sympathized with her as a family doctor and as a young mother myself. What ...

At the time, I really wanted to be a dancer. I was dancing four or five days a week, at an open studio where there were often professional dancers in my classes. When I looked around the room at the best dancers, the ones who I knew were doing commercial work, they all had one thing in common: they had navel piercings.

So I begged my parents to let me do it too. I whinged, and wheedled, and cajoled, and complained. I tried the door-in-the-face technique, saying that I wanted to get a tattoo, so that a mere navel piercing would seem reasonable by comparison.

Eventually, some time around October, they yielded ...

When I was fifteen, I got my belly button pierced.

At the time, I really wanted to be a dancer. I was dancing four or five days a week, at an open studio where there were often ...

Mother’s Day originated as an anti-war event, but it’s been turned into a way to push a normative idea of motherhood – you know, the one you see in that isle of Hallmark cards every year. The Strong Families campaign has put together a collection of cards for mamas who don’t fit the image of a Betty Draper housewife in a perfect nuclear family. The goal of the campaign is to acknowledge the moms who are erased in the commercialized version of Mother’s Day – immigrant moms, queer moms, trans moms, moms of color, single moms, moms parenting in collectives, working moms – the list goes on.

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